Children of the Revolution Page 2
The Revolution, however, was soon under threat from its enemies at home and abroad and a new unit of the revolutionary generation overturned the monarchy, proclaimed the Republic, tried and executed the king, and acceded to popular demands for a Terror aimed at all those suspected of frustrating the revolutionary project. For a year between July 1793 and July 1794 the Republic was ruled by a Jacobin dictatorship of twelve men of the Committee of Public Safety of the Convention parliament elected in 1792 which was dominated by Robespierre. A ruthless centralization was imposed on a country that civil war threatened to split into rival provinces, departments and cities. Church reform was abandoned and a campaign of dechristianization tried to eliminate organized religion, now seen as a threat to revolution. The former privileged orders of nobles and clergy were persecuted, driven underground or into exile, as were the new rich who were seen to benefit from their monopoly of goods in short supply. Women were excluded from the political sphere and political dissent in the arts subjected to censorship. The Jacobin dictatorship and Terror divided France into two, driving into implacable opposition young nobles such as François-René de Chateaubriand, who lost his mother and sister in the Terror and fought briefly in the counter-revolutionary armies before going into exile.
In 1794 the revolutionary brotherhood consumed itself in fratricidal struggle, those who survived turning against Robespierre in July 1794 (thermidor Year II in the revolutionary calendar) and seeking to rebuild the Republic on a lasting basis. A younger generation of revolutionaries born after 1760 now became involved. Madame de Staël, daughter of Louis XVI’s finance minister, Necker, confined to working behind the political scenes, and Benjamin Constant, a young Swiss intellectual and her sometime lover, endeavoured with many others to found a republic based on liberty instead of dictatorship, on the parliamentary rule of the propertied and educated instead of the rule of the mob and its demagogues. When this liberty collapsed into anarchy, the obvious solution was recourse to dictatorship by a general thrown up by the revolutionary armies who were establishing France as a Grande Nation in Belgium and the Netherlands, the Rhineland, Switzerland and Italy. There was more than one candidate among the revolutionary generals born in the 1760s, but it was General Bonaparte, conqueror of Italy after 1796 and Egypt and Syria in 1798, who emerged as dictator. Revolution as violence was ended and the principles of the Revolution were amalgamated with the need for order and unity. France was placed under extreme administrative centralization with prefects and mayors appointed by the central government. A new nobility was invented, made up of the regime’s military and civil elite. The Catholic Church was restored under the Concordat, but more as a department of state than as an independent corporation. The freedom of women was subordinated to the priorities of the family and divorce by mutual consent abolished. The arts were restricted by censorship or harnessed to state propaganda, with the revolutionary artist Jean-Louis David and his pupils recruited to paint the Emperor and his glorious deeds.
A second generation, born around 1800, did not witness the Revolution at first hand, but were the offspring of those who had made and secured it, either in government or on the battlefield. The distinctiveness of this generation, who grew up under the Napoleonic Empire and reached maturity around 1820, has been remarked on by his torians, in one case defined as the cohort born between 1792 and 1803.2 They were also intensely self-aware, raised in a period of excitement and greatness, which was abruptly terminated by the final defeat of the Empire at Waterloo following Napoleon’s Hundred Days return in 1815. Edgar Quinet, the son of a military bureaucrat, was taken as a child by his mother to visit his father at Wesel in the Rhineland. ‘We lived in the palace of the prince of Prussia,’ he recalled, ‘and saw nothing but soldiers dragging sabres. They were cavalrymen who had returned from Austerlitz, who had a high opinion of me, and no one could separate me from them.’ He was twelve when the Emperor returned from Elba and at that moment ‘I began to be fascinated by him, not just by French armies.’ After Waterloo and Napoleon’s final exile to St Helena his parents sent him away to college. ‘If I pitied my hero for the captivity he was to endure in the midst of the ocean, I found my own no less intolerable.’3 Similarly Alfred de Musset, the son of a writer who also served as a military bureaucrat, observed in his Confessions of a Child of the Century that his generation were ‘conceived between two battles and brought up in colleges to the roll of drums’. ‘For fifteen years they dreamed of the snows of Moscow and the sun of the Pyramids,’ but these vast horizons shrivelled after 1815. After that, ‘When the children spoke of glory, they were told, “Become priests”; when they spoke of ambition, “Become priests”; of hope, love, strength, life: “Become priests”.’4
This generation hated the attacks on the Revolution by the restored monarchy, the exile of the regicides, and the pernicious alliance of throne and altar. They wished to rediscover the Revolution as the bringer of liberty, equality and fraternity and to rerun the experiment, this time without the errors of violence, Terror or dictatorship that had discredited the project. One unit of the generation was composed of young liberal journalists who were active in Paris after the Restoration such as Adolphe Thiers, François Mignet and Charles de Rémusat. Thiers and Mignet wrote histories of the Revolution in the 1820s that presented it as a triumph of liberty and order against despotism and popular violence, and realized their dreams in the Revolution of July 1830 which installed a constitutional monarchy and rule of the propertied and educated elite. This outcome was attacked as a hijacking of democratic revolution that could be delivered only by the republic proclaimed by a rival group of this generation. Their fathers had been deputies of the Convention parliament of 1792–5 which had voted the death of the king and elected the Committee of Public Safety, or alternatively had been revolutionary or Napoleonic generals or officials. Among the first were Godefroy Cavaignac, whose father had been exiled to Brussels as a regicide and died there in 1829, and Auguste Blanqui, whose father had been elected to the Convention in 1793 when his home city of Nice was annexed by France. They joined forces with François Raspail, a former seminarist and schoolmaster from Carpentras whose family was in no sense revolutionary but who himself became a public figure whipping up local opinion in favour of revolution during the Hundred Days. These young men modelled themselves on Jacobins such as Robespierre, Saint-Just and Marat, calling their secret society of 30 July 1830 the Society of Friends of the People, after Marat’s revolutionary newspaper, and then, after it was dissolved the following year, the Society of the Rights of Man. Godefroy Cavaignac died in 1845, but his friends were orchestrators of the Revolution of 1848, which proclaimed the liberty of the sovereign people to make their own constitution through an elected constituent assembly, equality through universal manhood suffrage, and the avoidance of violence by fraternal union. In the event these revolutionaries were unable to avoid both violence and dictatorship. The working people of eastern Paris rose in revolt in June 1848, demanding social as well as political equality. Ironically, Cavaignac’s younger brother Eugène, a professional soldier, was entrusted with dictatorial powers to suppress it. Then in 1851 the president elected by universal suffrage, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, mounted a coup d’état against the constitution and set up a dictatorship. The following year he was proclaimed emperor. The generation of 1800, whether the revolutionaries of 1830 or those of 1848, thus suffered a double blow, and many of them went into exile or abandoned politics.
The generation of 1800 fought a long battle over the Church. One group were shocked by the recurrence of revolution in the Hundred Days of 1815 and became ardent defenders of the Catholic Church and monarchy. This included the curé d’Ars and Félicité de Lamennais, both of whom were born well before 1800 but were fired by the Hundred Days to be ordained in 1815 and begin the work of reconverting the French. Because of their commitment to the monarchy of 1815, which grew increasingly absolutist, the liberal unit of this generation became fiercely
anticlerical, intent on destroying the alliance of altar and throne, which it achieved in 1830. At the same moment Lamennais concluded that religion was best secured not by alliance with absolute monarchy but by alliance with liberty and led a number of peers and disciples born around 1800 towards the promised land of religion and freedom, a path that was soon closed by the Pope. In 1848 Frédéric Ozanam, born at the tail end of this generation, attempted to reconcile religion with democracy. In the cultural sphere, which was political by another name, the generation of 1800 was the Romantic generation. Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas were both sons of revolutionary–imperial generals, while the painter Eugène Delacroix was rumoured to be the illegitimate son of Talleyrand. Their work explored themes of love, liberty and violence, tested new techniques and appealed to new audiences. Children of the barracks and mess also included a number of prominent women such as Delphine Gay, the daughter of a Napoleonic officer for whom her mother had divorced under the revolutionary law of 1792, and George Sand, whose father, aide-de-camp to General Murat, was killed when she was four. These women were among the feminists antagonized by the prohibition of divorce in 1816 and sought a wider public role for women through journalism and fiction. Gay, now Delphine de Girardin, supported the Revolution of 1830, while George Sand committed herself to the Republic of 1848. As far as France’s international standing was concerned, they were appalled by the defeats of 1814–15 and the inability of governments to restore the greatness to which revolutionary and Napoleonic France had laid claim. Spokesmen such as Jules Michelet and Edgar Quinet dreamed of restoring French greatness and of France once again bringing liberty and civilization to the world.
A third generation, born around 1830, scarcely had the time to form any illusions before they were lost, destroyed first by the violent insurrection of June 1848 and its brutal suppression, then by the coup d’état and dictatorship of Louis-Napoleon. Whereas the generation of 1800 were wedded either to the constitutional monarchy or to the Republic, that of 1830 were less ideological, more pragmatic and less committed to one particular form of government or another. It was a generation of builders rather than dreamers. Since 1848 equality in the form of universal manhood suffrage was a given; it was not abolished but restored by Louis-Napoleon in 1851. What was at stake was liberty, or rather liberty with order, for there was a fear that liberty as a sole end would tip into violence. Some of this generation such as Émile Ollivier worked within the Second Empire, trying to make it more liberal, and enjoyed some success with the constitution of 1870, endorsed just before the defeat. Others profited from the defeat of the Empire in 1870, becoming the founding fathers of the Third Republic, constructing a parliamentary regime which would avoid both the authoritarian Empire and the excesses of the Paris Commune of 1871. This group was spearheaded by Léon Gambetta, Juliet Adam – who presided over the salon that launched Gambetta’s career – Jules Ferry and Auguste Scheurer-Kestner. Of course, not all of this generation were pragmatic and middle-of-the-road. A rival unit of this generation drew different conclusions from the events of 1848 and 1851. For them the brutal stifling of the cry for bread and freedom in the June Days and the coup d’état of 1851 expressed the violence which the bourgeoisie was prepared to adopt in order to safeguard its interests. They committed themselves to anarchism, following Pierre-Joseph Proudhon who was born late in the Romantic generation but was not fully politicized until the June Days. Alternatively they espoused the Jacobin revolutionism of Blanqui, who dispensed his philosophy from the prisons of the Second Empire, or Marxist socialism, which was becoming known through the meetings of the First Socialist International in the later 1860s. This unit included the likes of Jules Vallès, Henri Rochefort and Louise Michel, who avenged the June Days of 1848 with the Paris Commune of 1871.
The generation of 1830 made their views felt in other areas. They were decentralizers, happy with the centralization of political decision-making in Paris, but keen to see administration devolved to the departmental assemblies which advised prefects and to municipal councils, whose mayors should be elected. They had some influence under the Empire but realized concrete changes under the Third Republic. Since the Second Republic after the June Days and the Second Empire until 1860 restored the political influence of the Church, this generation aimed to reduce that political influence, especially by pruning back the ascendancy the Church had in education. Its anticlericalism was scientific rather than simply iconoclastic, as that of the generation of 1800 had been, for it developed a secular morality that would replace religious education in state schools, replacing fear of hell by fear of social disorder. Ernest Renan wrote a Life of Jesus based on scholarship, purged of mystery and placed in historical context. Jules Ferry, as education minister in the 1880s, excluded religious congregations and religious education from state schools. Since the education of women in particular was under the control of the Church, the generation of 1830 developed the state education of women, while the feminist wing of the generation, led by Maria Desraismes, campaigned in favour of the civil rights of women and obtained the legalization of divorce again in 1884. In the arts the generation of 1830 was less Romantic than Realist. Witnessing the defeat of dreams by naked political and military power in 1848 and 1851, writers such as the Goncourt brothers, Gustave Flaubert, Alexandre Dumas fils and Alphonse Daudet were persuaded to look reality in the face. In the art world the Realist Courbet was followed by Impressionists around Édouard Manet who painted modern life rather than legends or histories. Internationally, the defeat of France by Prussia on its road to a united Germany was felt with particular pain. It was the formative event of the adult years of this generation that sent many of them into deep reflection about the identity of the French nation, which had suffered a massive blow to its confidence. Ernest Renan, Fustel de Coulanges and Ernest Lavisse all contributed, in the wake of defeat, to redefining French national identity and to restoring the country’s national consciousness and confidence.5
A fourth generation, born around 1860 and thus still children during the Franco-Prussian war and Paris Commune in 1870–71, were less marked by these traumatic events than were their parents. They reached maturity during the early years of the Third Republic, when the regime was well secured against the threats of royalist or Bonapartist restoration or of popular revolution. By the 1890s many royalists and Bonapartists had ‘rallied’ to the Republic and even Marxist socialists were committed to the democratic process. The event which shaped it was the Dreyfus Affair of 1897–9 which reopened old conflicts between republicans and anti-republicans, anticlericals and Catholics, and sparked new conflicts between philo-Semites and anti-Semites, revolutionary patriots and reactionary nationalists. The main lesson learned by the generation of 1860 was that such conflicts were aberrant and needed to be defused by a process of what became known as apaisement or pacification. A republic of the centre had to be constructed which incorporated as many people as possible under its shade. The leaders of this generation, who assumed the reins of government after the Dreyfus Affair, in the so-called Belle Époque down to 1914, were drawn from both the centre-right and centre-left of the political spectrum. From the centre-right came Raymond Poincaré, Louis Barthou and Joseph Caillaux. From the centre-left were drawn former socialists who had flirted with anarchism, such as Aristide Briand, or socialists who had never really espoused Marxism, such as Alexandre Millerand and René Viviani. A serious Marxist such as Jean Jaurès did not hold power but steered the socialist party away from the rhetoric of revolutionary class war towards democratic socialism.
This generation were committed to rejuvenating the Republic in many ways. They challenged the system of administrative centralization that, with a few reforms by the 1830 generation, still held France in the iron grip of 1800. The Lorrainer Maurice Barrès, the Provençal Charles Maurras and the Languedocien Jean Charles-Brun were all serious campaigners for a more decentralized republic. On the religious front, they were committed to end the war of religion that was stirred
up again by the Dreyfus Affair. Aristide Briand was a key negotiator in the Separation of Church and state which abrogated the Concordat under which the Catholic Church had received state funding but had to submit to state control. The Church now floated free as an institution, and it became once again possible to be fully Catholic and fully republican. This generation included a new generation of feminists, led by Marguerite Durand, editor of La Fronde, and qualified lawyers and doctors such as Jeanne Schmal who demanded that married women should have control of their earnings and Madeleine Pelletier, who campaigned for birth control and the right to abortion. In the cultural sphere the generation of 1860 was that of the Symbolists, who retreated from the modern world embraced by their fathers and sought a spiritual ideal that might be expressed in myth or legend or primitive art. They included poets such as Rimbaud and followers of Mallarmé like André Gide and Paul Valéry, Marcel Proust, disciples of Pissarro such as Seurat and Signac, and of Gauguin such as Édouard Vuillard and Maurice Denis, and musicians such as Debussy.
Unlike the generation of 1830, which was shocked by defeat in 1870, the generation of 1860 tended to antimilitarism and a lack of interest in national greatness. It sported a number of antimilitarist agitators such as Lucien Descaves and Georges Darien. However, the Dreyfus Affair and the Fashoda incident of 1898 exposed the weakness of France internally and internationally. Some members of this generation, such as Maurice Barrès and Charles Maurras, converted overnight to the cause of nationalism. At the higher end of the generational spectrum, old enough to have witnessed the impact of 1870, powerful political advocates of France’s colonial empire, such as Eugène Étienne, were vindicated. Étienne had influence with soldiers who built the French Empire in Indo-China and Africa during the Third Republic, such as Galliéni and his deputy Lyautey. These were now joined by colonial soldiers born after 1860, notably Jean-Baptiste Marchand, who led the expedition to Fashoda, and Charles Mangin. International crisis prompted the political generation of 1860, headed by Poincaré and Barthou, to focus on the question of national greatness. Among socialists Alexandre Millerand who had previously questioned the use of soldiers to crush strikers now emerged as a strong defender of the French army and nation.